We recently connected with Nasrin S. Maesha & Shoummo Ahmed and have shared our conversation below.

Great question! Both of us have been creatives pretty much since childhood, and our passion for meaningful work got us involved in the development and humanitarian sector where we both spent a significant amount of time. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit us, we realized that there is a bigger pandemic happening silently, that is affecting us all – the climate crisis. But we weren’t quite focusing on it, there weren’t as many conversations going on about it as we need. And so as writers and creatives, we decided to use our skills to work for our planet and started raising awareness while educating ourselves constantly. Later, we came up with the idea of starting our own digital magazine “Green & Beyond Mag”.

Green & Beyond Mag is a digital magazine that promotes sustainable lifestyle and climate optimism through storytelling. We’re on a mission to inspire positive action towards a more sustainable world through hope. Apart from sharing ways to live more sustainably, we share stories of individuals, communities, and organizations who are taking positive action towards a better future for our planet. The problem is we often think that our small actions and choices don’t matter because of how insignificant they are – but if we just zoom out and look at it from a bigger perspective, and see millions of individuals like us making the same choices, suddenly the impact does not look so small anymore. So, you could be anyone – a student, an entrepreneur, a job holder, a homemaker, a content creator, a scientist, an activist – whoever you are, no matter wherever you are from in the world, if you’re taking actions to make the world a better place, then you’ve got a story to tell; and we at Green & Beyond Mag do just that – we tell your story to the world to inspire hope in attempt to create a ripple of positive actions for a healthier planet.

Over the years, through Green & Beyond Mag, we have so far covered stories of many incredible people like climate activists, entrepreneurs, authors, artists, sustainable fashion experts, content creators, musicians, businesses, organizations and communities who are taking initiatives to save our planet and live in harmony with nature.

Apart from the interviews, our work has given us some really wonderful opportunities from around the world – like we have been official media partners to some remarkable events like Eco Fashion Week Australia, Regenerative Gala in California, Eco Fashion Week Kenya, Kibera Fashion Week, Fashion World Tokyo, Sustainable Fashion Expo in Dubai and many more from around the world. But the most important one so far is that we got the opportunity to be media partners of the Entertainment & Culture Pavilion at COP28 that happened in Dubai last year.

Maesha’s story:

Driven from my passion to work on something meaningful from a very young age, I started working in the development sector as a student, and spent over 7 years working with education, food and women empowerment. During those times, I got to work very closely with marginalized communities in rural areas, where I got to realize that they were suffering from something bigger than poverty. While Bangladesh is one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, these communities are more vulnerable than us to the climate crisis.

I was always a creative, from a very young age. As a kid, I used to fill up my colorful class notebooks writing fictional stories on them, creating my own books out of them. Growing up, I used to write blogs and articles too, even while I had my full time job. And sitting at my small office desk, I always wondered why I felt so out of place. I know now that it was because I wasn’t really meant to be doing that, I was born to create.

When I met Shoummo, we just clicked. We had this shared love and compassion for the environment, and we both loved to express our thoughts in writing. It was perfect! Plus, as we also had my sister Nawar N. Khan Raeesa (who is also a co-founder of Green & Beyond Mag), an environmental science graduate and a fantastic researcher on board, we knew we had everything we needed to start meaningful conversations around the climate crisis. And off we went, we started constantly educating ourselves more, getting involved and engaging within relevant communities. We wanted to use our skills to raise increased awareness on the issue and share actionable steps that people can take. Later, we realized that a digital magazine would be the most perfect way to best utilize our skills and resources to amplify our message.

Over time, having been exposed too much to the doom and gloom of the climate crisis, we realized how this only brings climate anxiety and inaction. And although the climate crisis can be a very depressing topic, having been in the sector for a while, we have found out that there are countless people from around the world who are constantly working to heal our planet, to save our planet. This gave us hope, and we decided to do just that for our audience too. Hence, we shifted our approach to inspiring hope and action through sharing positive stories of people, communities and platforms all around the world.

Shoummo’s story:

I always enjoyed writing from my early teenage days as far as I can remember. Reading amazing books always made me wonder how the writers do it – paint pictures with words. I also loved poems – the first creative work as a writer that I ever did was to write two poems for a wall magazine for “International Mother Language Day”. After that I always enjoyed writing – poems, lyrics, short fictions etc.

Growing up, I had a little chance to keep writing as a passion – it was tough for an engineering student such as myself to find time to do that. But from time to time I used my passion and skill to work as a freelance writer, and earn some pocket-money in my university days.

Later, after graduation, I did not pursue a career in engineering but joined a non-profit organization to work in the environmental, development sector, and from time to time I had the opportunity to write.

But the COVID-19 pandemic opened my eyes, and made me realize that life is too short to not work for something that I believe in by using the skills that I have. So here I am, a writer and now an editor too of Green & Beyond Mag.

The goal that is driving our journey is simple – to raise climate awareness through our work and inspire climate action. We also focus heavily on promoting climate optimism through storytelling.

Whenever anyone hears about climate change, the climate crisis – most of the times people either avoid it, don’t take it much seriously, or worse – all they can think about is the “doom and gloom”, the natural disasters, the “bad weather” news and it surely is not healthy for our mental health. So we work to change this narrative. Yes, climate change is happening, and the situation is certainly not very great, but hey, we all have the power to do something about it, and as Earthlings it is our responsibility to take actions, no matter how small or even imperfect. And to inspire them, we bring up stories from all around the world, stories of people and organizations who are doing amazing things for our planet, to overcome the climate crisis. We bring up these stories with the hope that it will make people understand that “climate news” does not only mean “bad weather updates” but there are so many great things, beautiful things happening too, and through these stories we aim to inspire others to learn from them and take meaningful action. That’s our goal!

The most rewarding aspect is being able to work on ideas and bring them to life through our creativity, especially because we do it with the hope of bringing meaningful positive changes for us and for our planet.